Sport and Exercise – LisaZWise.com

Working out little and often over the long haul – my sporting career

I have spent most of my adult life playing various sports and engaging in exercise. In early primary school, I was short and asthmatic and slow at running for my age, and I was also a year younger than many of my classmates. The hurdles were like high-jump for me, and there were no lower ones to learn on. We weren’t really a beach family so I didn’t learn to swim well, nor were we a netball family, so I didn’t play team sports. While I didn’t do a lot of formal exercise, I did walk 1 km to school every day, and I always arrived an hour early so I could play on the play equipment – various horizontal bars and monkey bars of different heights and some ropes. I remember my first blisters and callouses on my hands on on the back of my legs from doing spins on the bars, and I remember the joy of doing the “top flip” from successively higher bars and walking around my back yard on my hands. Unfortunately, I never went to calisthenics or gymnastics to learn how to do those movements in a technically correct way. And while it is not something that I seemed to be aware of at the time (somewhat strangely in hindsight), my dad, who was very sporty, was being treated during this time period for TB contracted during the war, so he really wasn’t in a great state to play with us kids.

The thing that kick-started my sporting career was the school rounders team (rounders being a modified version of baseball). I wanted to play on first base, but I couldn’t throw accurately to third base (in reality I couldn’t even throw to third base inaccurately … it was too far). My friend Francine and I decided to learn to throw like the boys, so we got our tennis balls and used the brick wall of the two-storey school building as our training area. The rules were that we threw the ball overarm, the ball had to hit the wall below the first storey line and come back to us on the full. This was my first progressive training program, self-designed in Grade 5 at the age of 9 or 10 years old. Initially, we had to be very close to the wall but eventually our bodies figured out how to throw the ball to generate power, and we ended up being on the far side of the netball court and aiming for specific bricks. That early deliberate practice got me the first base gig on the rounders team, and laid a foundation for good fielding skills and wicket-keeping in my 15 years of playing cricket.

I attended a private girls school for my secondary education – this school had quite a broad range of sport options on offer, and while I was sent there for the academic and musical opportunities, it was at school that I was exposed to different sports. We could play a different sport each term for our “house” although formal physical education classes ended in year 9 for those taking an academically focused program. I played softball (using a baseball, but underarm pitching), table-tennis and cricket, and also discovered that there was an active women’s cricket competition in Melbourne, with a club in my local area. I joined the local cricket team and walked the 2.5 km to and from training twice a week and again for games on Saturday. In all the time that I played sport, our training involved a warmup (running laps of the oval), a few random stretches and toe-touches, and then drills or simulated play. We batted and bowled in the nets, and we practised catching the ball. There was no strength or conditioning, and any specialist training was purely in terms of the technical aspects of the sport.

Meanwhile many of the girls on my cricket team loved their Australian Rules football, and we often played kick-to-kick before or after training. One day, we were kicking the footy around and were invited to train at the local football club. There was great excitement about the possibilities of actually playing football (in 1974!) until the recruiters realised that we were actually girls – and then, no dice! While girls could not play Aussie Rules footy, it was actually possible to play soccer, but my father was not at all supportive. I wanted to be a goalie, and his verdict was that I was too short … a fairly accurate assessment if I was aiming to be an international star, but probably not a good reason not to try out a youth sport.

By the time I went to university, I was pretty dedicated to my cricket training, and trained during the winter, including running and net sessions at an indoor facility. In trying out different clubs and societies, I joined the Karate Club, which I think was Shotokan style, and while I was keen to learn, the instructor was not impressed with having women in class. After a few weeks of training, the requirement to stay training was being able to do 50 pushups on your knuckles on the wooden floor – not something that most women can do without any prior training for it. He also had a habit of walking along the lines and punching people in the stomach to test whether their abs were tight – again something that should probably be taught before it’s tested. While I didn’t persevere in martial arts in that environment, it stayed in the back of my mind as something I wanted to do. While my mother was an out-and-out pacifist, my father learnt karate under the Japanese during the war (so, like bush camping, not something he then wanted to do for “fun”) and was an avid Muhammad Ali fan, and made me watch Ali’s fights with him while he gave a running commentary on them.

During university, I continued playing cricket, travelling across town to play with a top level team rather than staying with my local club. I also regularly went bush camping with friends, in my early twenties finally learnt how to ride a pushbike. My mother had decided that cycling on the road was too dangerous for young people, so I had never graduated from my tricycle to a bicycle – so when I bought my first bike, I decided to buy a good one, and to ride to and from work every day, rain, hail, sleet or snow (the latter two of which were highly unlikely in Melbourne – if I’d known better, I would have specified headwind or 40 deg heat as my extremes!). If after a year of riding, I decided I didn’t like it, the bicycle would have paid its way. For my first ride from Mont Albert to Monash University in Clayton, I selected all the back roads I could find, and it took me more than an hour and half to ride the 15 km, via streets I now know were the hilliest option I could have found – up past a water tower in one backstreet detour. I persevered and within a few months I was arriving at uni in well under an hour feeling quite invigorated despite my ride being consistently against the prevailing winds. Because of my late start in cycling, I always consider myself not a cyclist, but it turns out I’ve been cycling reasonably consistently for 40 odd years now, so that’s probably longer than many.

While at uni, I made the most of the extensive sports facilities, reasonably regularly playing squash badly, going for a swim (and fighting the water all the way), very occasionally even venturing onto the tennis courts for our short-lived Friday afternoon pre-drinks lab tennis game. Given that I did a PhD and then became an academic, I stayed on various campuses for quite a long time, and eventually began my soccer career in the Queens University post-grad women’s soccer team. We graduated to the local comp (quite a diverse demographic) and on returning to Australia, I joined the Monash University Soccer Team in a serious attempt to become a good goalie. Sadly, after three games, I was accidentally but forcefully kicked in the ribs by a much bigger opponent (the joys of mixed ability recreational sport – no violent intent, but a complete misread of play) and spent the next week or so in hospital recovering from broken ribs and a punctured lung. Given that I was mother to a young child and had just started a new job, I decided that maybe soccer was a bit risky for the moment, and went back to playing cricket.

As my kids grew older, it seemed that it was time to start them in the sports they might want to participate in rather than continue to play formal sport myself – so I retired from cricket, and started taking the kids to gymnastics (for fundamental movement skills) and swimming (for basic safety – not negotiable until they could swim competently). The kids variously tried netball, soccer, racquetball and rollerblading, but eventually gravitated towards indoor soccer and taekwondo, both of which I also joined in on. Partly it gave me something to do while waiting between games and training, but more so because, while I liked to watch the kids play, it was very difficult not to step into a coaching mode or to be that parent that cared more about the game than the child playing. I started both sports around the same time, and I was also commuter-cycling around 150 km per week along with training for events like Around the Bay in a Day (an annual 210 km bike ride). I really enjoyed sharing sport activity with my kids – I did two Great Victorian Bike Rides with the family when the children were very young and were carried (variously in a bike seat, in utero, and in a trailer) and then again twice with my daughter riding her own bike.

Indoor soccer was a year-round activity for 10 years – the time it took for my son to graduate from his grade 5 team through to playing in the parents-and-kids mixed indoor team until finally all the kids from the various families had moved on. Over 10 seasons, the parents-and-kids team only missed the finals for a couple of seasons (there were three seasons per year) and we were regularly on the winners’ podium. This team began as a parent-kids team focused on a couple of families who knew each other well, and I was a bit of a ring-in as my son was allocated to “their team”. Over ten years, a cast of thousands moved in and out of the team, and the glue that held the team together was the social connection around playing sport with family and friends. It was quite revealing to me how stoked some of the fathers were to be playing sport not only with their children, but also with their partners, who may not have played sport ever, or at least since primary school. I love the fact that my biggest collection of medals and trophies comes from the one sport I have participated over a consistent period of time that I never trained for – I just showed up and played – it seems that the awards and medals I have are inversely proportional to my skills, merit and care-factor in both academic and sporting endeavours. I’m pretty sure there’s a lesson there.

Taekwondo became an interesting contrast with indoor soccer. I started them at the same time, but I am still training in taekwondo, and from Day 1, I took taekwondo seriously and worked very hard to acquire skills and knowledge. I also built long-lasting friendships, and those have endured beyond taekwondo. I trained taekwondo with both of my children and there have been challenges over time with there being such a close family connection and connection across generations in terms of friendships and associations. The complexities of such levels of interaction can create challenges, but overall I still think of as a real bonus. My interest in taekwondo began at a time when I was very actively involved in designing, developing and supporting online teaching resources, and in using the internet myself, so I blogged quite a bit about taekwondo and academia. My personal website at Wisebytes.net was first established in 2002, and I wrote reasonably regularly for around five years. Sadly, in that time, the internet moved from being a space for sharing ideas and content to a place for selling ideas and content, and all of a sudden, what people said as private individuals online might begin to intersect with how workplaces or organisations viewed their brand. It seems so strange to be writing these words – probably for most people, the internet in 2021 is all about brand, and all about curating personal and professional image.

So while I’ve continued on in taekwondo to the point of being a 4th degree blackbelt, and competing in two World Championship competitions and winning a gold medal in my veterans sparring division, and I’ve spent the last decade dabbling in strength training, initially in the interests of avoiding hip surgery and later to prepare for, and recover from, a total hip replacement, and I’ve recently also started to learn boxing, I’ve tended not to post about my training or my academic work. There are so many options of where to post things, and as it turns out, I have a poorly curated presence on Facebook, very limited activity on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter (pretty much none at all other than having a profile) and a half-baked attempt to create appropriate spaces for academic, sport and personal sharing. It’s coming more and more to my attention that the lines between different spaces is becoming more and more blurred, so the only realistic way to curate any internet space is to keep it all in one spot. Which is here.

Observations on online teaching and coaching

In the new Covid19 world, I enjoy listening to podcasts as I go for my daily walk, and my favourite podcast while I’m walking is Dan John’s podcast. If you haven’t read Dan John’s extensive library of work in the strength and conditioning and coaching world, there are 35 of these podcasts already, and they only started recently!

In today’s podcast, Dan was fielding a question from someone who asked about online coaching being “the way of the future” post-covid19, and I was interested to reflect on Dan’s response. He noted that he had been doing online / remote coaching for a very long time, originally via the post (yep, writing regular letters to his coach about his workouts and training, and getting responses on how he was going and what to do next), and then via the Web (in what now might be called a Blog, but in the olden days was just a regular website).

The key feature of remote or online training is the fact that it is asynchronous. Dan reminded us that, even when it is synchronous, or live, it is asynchronous in the sense that we don’t know when or where our participants might be. When I tune into someone’s live-streamed lunch-time exercise class from Melbourne, it may be midday for me, but it might be 3:00 am for another person in Paris … and the whole way of thinking about 3:00 am training is different! It may also be summer in Melbourne and winter in Paris or vice-versa.

So while many people are happy to put on a Jane Fonda style aerobics video and “follow along”, or tune into a TV or web-cast yoga class, if you are seriously into teaching or coaching your individual students and you need an income stream from so doing, there is a whole lot more going on. Importantly, I am very happy to pay a subscription for Dan John’s workouts and member resources because I already know who he is and a bit about how he thinks, which makes me confident I will get value for money. Do you have enough free content yourself to make someone happy to pay for your ongoing services, and do you have the time, energy and skills to keep on creating fee-worthy materials?

In the podcast, Dan also talked about his experience putting college level courses online, emphasising the huge amount of work required to prepare the materials. This is the very steep learning curve many academics and teachers are on right now – the idea, as Dan expressed it, is that there is a whole lot of work required to create an online learning site, but the payoff is that it is then a bit of a doddle to teach … you just need to pop in regularly to see how people are going and to answer their individual questions. This is when I started gesticulating and trying to talk back to the podcast (so yes, asynchronous, but still synchronous in how my own mind connects with what is being said). The part that Dan may well take foregranted is that the ability to “pop in and see how students are going” is a high level skill in itself. The thing about asynchronous learning is that people have a lot of time to think about your materials – they can ask you things and raise questions that you had not anticipated, and may not be prepared for, and they can do it at times when you are not “in that headspace”. Many teachers get by with knowing enough to fill the scheduled teaching time, and answer a few extra questions, and then “sorry folks, time’s up”. Dan can “pop in and field questions” because of his own formidable depth of knowledge in strength and conditioning, and in religious studies, along with his own dedication to learning from his students. Some of us find interaction with our students to be challenging in a very enjoyable way and it’s what motivates us, but for others, it is very anxiety-provoking. The podcast and forum on Dan’s site emphasise his commitment to “closing the loop with feedback”, whereby he reflects on and responds to people’s feedback. This ensures that he is tailoring his knowledge to each individual, while sharing that learning with his broader community of practice. This is not something that many newbie online coaches will have the skills, experience and enthusiasm to pull off, and they will also not be aware of how much time it takes to do this.

Online coaching has been a “thing” for quite a few years now, and I have pretty much learned all I know about strength and conditioning online, originally through reading the work of people like Krista Scott-Dixon, Brett Contreras, Mark Rippetoe, Jim Wendler and Ross Emanit among others, but eventually settling on Dan John as my “go-to” source of information, particularly after discovering that two young Australian people I know through taekwondo, had randomly stayed at Dan’s house and trained with him (and I say randomly, because it was not a visit planned in advance, but rather Dan’s amazing generosity and hospitality to total strangers because they were interested in his work and were passing through the US with a flexible itinerary).

All of the online people I have learnt from have been building impressive online sites for training for the last decade or more, and most of them have also been building subscription services for some of their material more recently. In the time of Covid19, they already had the platform, the existing content, the strong client base, and serious skills to take it all online. People completely underestimate the amount of deep knowledge, time and other skills required to maintain a steady stream of online content, and to generate new material that matches the changing needs of a changing audience. I have worked in online education for the better part of 25 years, and for the past 5 years or more, I have a flurry of blog posts around Christmas/New Year about how I’m going to update my online presence and reorganise my resources, and then my “real work” of university classes begin, and it all falls in a heap – it really takes dedication to generate regular high quality online content and helps to be part of a team.

So after listening to Dan, I thought I would put together some thoughts on what people might consider if they are thinking of taking their face-to-face training business online. This is a non-exhaustive (but somewhat exhausting) list:

Do you have a loyal face-to-face clientele who want to continue training through Covid19?
- If they are in the same time-zone, can you have them log in to their regular time-slot of class, which you live-stream?
- While the training itself may be sub-par compared with live classes, you will be maintaining the social cohesion of your classes and allowing clients to maintain a routine, which is really important in times of upheaval (for you as well as your clients).
Are you planning on your Covid19 strategy being part of your “new normal”?
- You will have a LOT of work to do in building the range of skills to make it sustainable – I think of this as being in Dan John’s quadrant 3 of training – lots of skills at a high level.
- You will also need to know what your value proposition is in this new normal – with full awareness that your competition will not just be the guy down the street or in the next suburb, but will be a whole global audience.
- At the end of Covid19, people who were ready to go online before the crisis began may have a whole new clientele some of which may originally have been your clients, but there will also be people craving for face-to-face instruction … so you need to be clear about where your primary skills lie and what that will mean into the future.
Do you want to be able to give your clients feedback?
- You can use Facetime, Skype, Zoom, Messenger as easy ways of connecting with your students and running the classes in a way that is familiar TO THEM.
- If you are live-streaming via You-Tube or Vimeo, will this be possible? Let’s Plays have the advantage that the activity being videoed is on the screen, so it is easy to interact with your live class, but it is harder to chat while you’re teaching or participating in a physical class where you may not be able to see the screen or stay in your video shot without someone actually being at the other end of a camera.
- You can have them send videos of their session for you to critique. This is a great way to do things, but VERY time consuming, and not at all sustainable if you have a large client base or a lot of time, or excellent Shark Habits. Apps like Coaches Eye work well for this.
Do you want to be able to pace your session according to how clients are going?
- If they’re your regular clients, they may be comfortable interacting, but you’ll need to be mindful of whether they have space, and whether there are other people also doing your sessions with them.
- Pacing a session to a live audience is a skill, but it is a different skill doing it online where you can’t quickly see people, you can’t quickly see or hear their breathing, when the video is not good enough to notice subtle changes in coordination that might tell you to slow down or switch things up or offer technical corrections.
Do you want them to be able to socialise with their regular training partners?
- You’ll need something where everyone is able to see each other, but your classes will need to be smaller (which is good, but will take more work)
- Forums are a great place to build a community on line, but not everyone is comfortable with “socialising” in this way.
Are you proficient with technology?
- For the most part, to be successful with online coaching, especially if you don’t have a bespoke team of tech support people, requires that you use technology you’re comfortable with.
- For many people (both coaches and clients), that will be their smart phone and services like Instagram and Messenger or Skype. You can also pay for hosted services that allow for live streaming of content, or you can use a host of available Apps, but it is important that you can use those tools well and you know how they work and what data they are capturing (e.g., your members to whom they can target their advertising …).
- Dan makes a great point that I think many people miss: he makes lots of, as he says, “crappy videos” that are “right-now” videos of people actually doing stuff and they are for instructional purposes. They are NOT beautifully curated videos of Insta-perfection and there is a whole other post to write on the difference between right-now online teaching materials for your own specific audience at a particular time versus professionally made digital resources for “everyone”. The short story is that you need a lot of deep knowledge to know what are the important instructional qualities that will help your clients, whereas Insta-perfection is more about advertising your look
Are you able to spend money on pay-for online services?
- If you are just looking to see your business through Covid19, can you really afford to be investing in pay-for online services?
- However if you are trying to create a future business model, can you afford not to. In my experience, you will need to pay for the infrastructure, and you will need to have professional technical support to take care of website issues, live streaming issues if that’s what you are offering for a fee, payment gateways and security if it is your long term business. Would you really set up a physical gym as your main business, and leave all the doors unlocked including the door to your office and to any resources you sell, and never do any maintenance on your equipment? It’s a serious undertaking to create and maintain a website with content that people pay for.

As I noted, these are just a few ideas that came to mind after listening to Dan’s podcast, and the reason why my own website is only updated in bursts and spurts, is that I vacillate between publishing what I’m thinking right now (as blogging used to be) versus trying to write the perfect go-to article. I’m trying to be more like Dan, to put my stuff out there quickly in case it’s useful to others, even though the primary value has been to clarify and record my own ideas and reflections. And I’m trying not to clog up Dan’s forums with overly long posts 🙂

How to keep exercising and training at home

As you probably already know if you know me, apart from my university life, I like to train in martial arts. In particular, I have been training and instructing ITF taekwondo at the United Schools of Martial Arts for more than 15 years, and more recently I have added some (very intermittent) cross training in boxing at Murphy’s Boxing Gym

I’m now trying to put together some stuff on Moodle to allow specific face-to-face classes, i.e., classes with the instructors and people you already know and work with, to continue online into the future.

Update to this post in 2021 – as it turned out, I did not get very far trying to help out my taekwondo and boxing schools. Why not? Setting up independent websites for production quality presentation is no longer a cottage industry that can be managed on-the-side while running a full time job, especially during a pandemic, when you can’t walk through ideas and concepts with people. Big tech was much quicker to respond and update services so that everybody could use Zoom, Skype and Instagram Live to stay in touch with clients. As each product got better, the others had to boost themselves to keep people in their ecosystems.

But in the mean time, there are already some great training options already available online for general fitness and conditioning. Here are two (two people, four sites) of my favourites:

Dan John Workouts (with a free Covid-19 trial I think)
Dan John’s open site
Ross Enamit’s Training site (with lots of ideas over many years for how to build your own gym equipment)
Ross Enamit’s Boxing site

Why Moodle, and not just YouTube channels and Skype? Because it allows for interaction and classes for your own specific clients as an interactive process rather than consumption of media.

My Taekwondo blog …

It is more than two years since I wrote anything in my taekwondo blog – but not because there is nothing interesting to say. In the past two years I have learned so much more about technique and application and moral culture, and it has been an exciting and challenging time to be part of USMA. Apart from my own thoughts on taekwondo, I’ve been delighted to watch my daughter’s skills develop and was very proud that she represented Australia in Argentina in the World Championships. She just missed the medal round in patterns, and performed to the best of her ability in sparring – a great effort for her first international event.

The reason that my taekwondo blog has died is a sad reflection on taekwondo in Australia – too much politics, not enough technique / application, and a seeming abyss of moral culture. To write anything about taekwondo, to question any technique, to reflect on good and bad aspects of the art form, to consider the relationship between a Korean martial art developed in a military context and modern Australian cultural context – all these are political minefields with people searching for disrespect or subversion or technical error in every utterance, rather than looking for a way forward and an open exchange of ideas to build on the wonderful foundation created by General Choi and bring it to people of all walks of life, including women and children.

When the administration of taekwondo is more about building individual business interests than serving the students of taekwondo (giving back to taekwondo in the form of leadership and instruction), the moral culture at the core of the martial art is destroyed. There will always be a very difficult path to tread through the democratic legal framework for Not-for-profit Associations versus the Dan hierarchy of a martial art, and the only way to negotiate a path through this is through plenty of discussion around common goals. Of course this is almost impossible if there are no common goals, and most parties have the goal of exerting maximum power with minimum input.

So rather than writing a whole lot of stuff about the exciting things that I’ve learned through training taekwondo with Sabum Cariotis and sharing my passion for a martial art with other people who might have thought of starting but did not know whether it would be okay for them (e.g., too old, too unfit, too inflexible, wrong demographic etc), I don’t write anything at all. It is a real shame, because so much of the way I think in my own professional area of cognitive science and spatial coding has been heavily influenced by my martial arts training. My discussions with Sabum Cariotis on space, time, temporal sequencing of movements, trigger points, options and decision-making have triggered all sorts of ways of understanding spatial coding, and I have also learned so much about cognitive aspects of training for expert skilled performance through watching Sabum Cariotis instruct and learning how to instruct martial arts under his guidance.

I have to say also that my eLearning blog has also died somewhat because of similar issues – universities are also becoming more focused on their business interests than on their core mission of community service through generating and sharing knowledge and understanding. I work for a specific institution and my academic output belongs to this institution as part of their “intellectual property” … such a strange concept, that “intellectual property” has a life of its own outside of any individual’s own intellect. It would be an interesting exercise to force university managers (and taekwondo practitioners) to study enough philosophy of mind to have a view of what constitutes knowledge (or skilled performance) and whether or not it can exist independently of the mind (or body) which is using it …

The more we learn, the less we know?

When I first started learning taekwondo, I didn’t really think of myself as a “martial artist”, I didn’t feel like part of the martial arts community, nor did I see myself as a core part of my own taekwondo school. This is not a reflection on USMA or the people within it, because it is a most welcoming school for students of all ages and from all backgrounds. It is much more about the way in which I viewed myself, my capabilities, and my reasons for being there, compared with the way in which I viewed the other students in the school on these dimensions.

The initial phase of learning for me was very focussed on the pragmatic aspects of learning sequences of movements and techniques – where to put my hands and feet and how to coordinate the most basic of actions. A blog of my “journey in taekwondo” was really a bit like a homework diary on learning something as an outsider with no particular skill at it, and recording my experience in an easily accessible place in case other people like me wanted to know some of the things a novice might need to learn (eg what are the movements in 3 step sparring? what is the student oath? etc). I have received a few emails from complete strangers asking exactly these sorts of things.

However, as I mastered performance of these physical aspects to a greater or lesser degree, I began to understand how much more depth there is in each movement than just the basic physical execution. I also started to understand some of the theoretical aspects of the martial art and to start seriously considering the philosophical underpinnings of martial arts in general. This was in the context of my own research work in cognitive science, but also in the context of teaching and learning, and in terms of my own understanding of morality and social justice.

The “journey” stopped being a purely physical one in terms of how to kick and punch and learn my patterns and perform in front of an audience, and has become much more of a philosophical one focussed on how these things fit with in with “moral culture”, discipline and ways of thinking. I also started to get to know my fellow students and to become an insider within the school. I can no longer comment on martial arts as an outsider or observer, as I am now very much part of the USMA community, and through this association, with the broader taekwon-do community. I am no longer anonymous, and my views, while still my own, are no longer *just my own* – as an assistant instructor at USMA, even my personal views will reflect on the school itself, as will my personal conduct in the rest of my life. In particular, any views I have on instruction or hierarchy or NGBs or martial arts politics will to some extent be taken to reflect on my own Instructor irrespective of whether they align with his views. In any event, in the martial arts world it is probably not appropriate for a first dan to comment on such matters publically.

At this point in my “taekwon-do journey”, I see taekwon-do as a martial art, and see a martial art as a way of life which does not neatly turn off when I leave the dojang. Similarly, my professional life as a cognitive scientist and psychologist does not magically turn off outside the office and nor does the belief system and ethical position attached to it. And I remain a mother, daughter, friend and colleague for various people whether I’m in the dojang or my office or not. The trick is how to reconcile the disparate views of the world encompassed in these various roles and relationships and make an integrated whole. The more we learn, the more we see how different ideas might relate to each other and how much more there is to know in order to understand the world. The more people we know, the more we are exposed to different ways of looking at the world.

And the more we know people, the more we know the myriad ways we can be misunderstood, misinterpreted and misrepresented despite our best intentions, and the best intentions of others. Audience matters, and although I am willing to defend most of what I say in public or private, sometimes it is important to know the motivation and intent of the potential audience.

Of course, having said that, you might well ask why on earth I would keep a blog on the internet if I care about who might be in my audience? It’s a good question, and a difficult one to answer. Probably because I think it is important to hold our views up for scrutiny, even just the self-scrutiny involved in writing them down. And the web was the tool of a much smaller (mostly academic) community when I first started using it.

More importantly though, I think that I am identifying the fact that, as taekwon-do for me has moved from being an “activity” to a “way of life”, my taekwon-do blog has evolved from being a blog about “ooh wow, great excitement, I broke a board”, and “here are 5 2-step sparring drills to remember” to a blog of thoughts about how we live, how we learn, and how we relate to each other. These are much more personal insights which at some level involve other people in my life and so require a greater level of thought in terms of how (and whether) they should be written.

Perhaps as I start training seriously for my second dan grading, my taekwon-do views will become more focused on specifics that are more publically sharable. There’s nothing like a grading to focus the mind – and, as I write, I suspect the frequency of my blog posts is actually most closely related to the frequency of gradings … an self-insight that is worth re-considering in the broader context of teaching and learning.

Taekwon-do and cognitive science

I haven’t written in my taekwon-do blog since our new dojang opened in January – but I have been thinking a lot about the way in which my study of taekwon-do has informed my thinking about cognitive science.

Let me be clear about this: there are three elements to my study of taekwon-do which have been pivotal in influencing the way I think.

1) my Instructor, who introduced me to the martial art in an accessible way, showing the theory and practice, the moral culture and application, and most of all, demonstrating through everything he does the ongoing level of passion and commitment required to become a martial artist.

2) the 15 volume encyclopedia of taekwon-do (and its condensed version), written by General Choi, which documents the martial art itself and the structure of the taekwon-do syllabus through which a martial artist can learn his or her art form.

3) the conceptual mapping across perceptual learning, motor learning and meta-cognitive awareness of learning principles through which my Instructor is able to relate theory and practice and through which he gave me sufficient insight and desire to understand the depth and richness of the curriculum developed by General Choi.

As I have remarked elsewhere in my taekwon-do blog, the structure of the taekwon-do curriculum, bringing together the martial arts of east with the educational system of the western military (US Military Academy), is a masterpiece of curriculum design and exposition. However, based as it is on curriculum design principles for a military curriculum, there is no specific curriculum framework for children. I have also discussed elsewhere in my blog the special facility my Instructor has in working with young children and older people, two groups who are not the traditional focus for martial arts instruction.

The focus I have had in previous posts on martial arts and instructing children have been based around motivational factors in terms of learning most likely because I was involved in educational design of “learning materials”. However now that I am reading Eleanor Gibson (Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development), Williams and Hodges(Skill Acquisition in Sport), Johnson-Frey (Taking Action: Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Intentional Acts) and such things, focusing on perceptual learning and cross-modal sensory-motor integration, I am seeing other aspects of the taekwon-do syllabus that are masterful in terms of design.

I am currently working with concepts of dynamic coordination and constraints in skill acquisition, which fit pretty nicely with the taekwon-do concept of sinewave, and how these fit in with instructional models. This approach contrasts sharply with traditional instructional approaches emphasising verbal instruction, active cognitive processing of knowledge, and dependency on feedback from instructors. The role of the instructor or coach in the dynamic approach is

“to ensure the correct ‘discovery environment’ through the manipulation of task and environmental constraints in an attempt to guide exploration of the dynamics of the perceptuo-motor workspace … if one uses the metaphor of a ‘story’ to conceptualise the skill acquisition process in sport, then the end-state form (the skill) to be acquired by each individual is not prescribed at the outset, but is painstakingly and creatively written ongoingly. In such a ‘self-reading and self-writing’ dynamical system (Kugler, 1986), practitioners have a major say in the development of the individual’s unique storyline by creating localised pressures (as constraints) so that functional global systems behaviour emerges from practice time. The implication is that there is a need for significant research programmes in the sport and exercise sciences to gain a broad understanding of how constraints shape the individual ‘stories’ of skill acquisition in different sports contexts.”

The constraints-led model asserts that the set of possible movement solutions for a skill to be acquired can be limited by the dimensions of the perceptuo-motor workspace imposed by the coach or training environment. Directed coaching or training environments with limited dimensionality will only support a very narrow search process, whereas unbounded workspaces allow unconstrained search which can be unrewarding, inefficient and potentially unsafe. An important role of the coach or instructor from this perspective is to support the perceptuo-motor search process by manipulating constraints so that exploration occurs within the optimal area of the perceptuo-motor workspace.

Interactions between the coach and student are minimised during early stages of learning so that the important dynamics of the movement task are revealed through discovery.

“In a soundbite, the key point is: Let the learner begin to write her own story. Direct coach intervention at this stage may well assist in the short-term assembly of coordinative structures as temporary solutions, but the ongoing process of establishing control may be delayed as a result of inappropriate (i.e. textbook and non-individualised) coordinations early on. In fact, the adoption of generalised ‘textbook’ approaches can be likened to the short-term solution of ‘plagiarism in our analogy of writing a story. In other words, the learner may come to rely on these ‘neatly packaged’ temporary solutions for immediate performance effects in specific environments. But the unique relationships between movement subsystems, which influence long-term performance transfer to novel situations, will not be established early in learning” Williams et al 1999, p322.

This all starts sounding very like the ideas I was trying express early in my blog in the article on Teaching Kids.

New Dojang

There has been a long break in writing to this blog – but mostly because I have been too busy “doing” to be writing …

The most exciting thing in my taekwon-do life is the fact that USMA (my school) now has its own Headquarters, a full-time dojang in Clayton.

dojang

It is a fantastic venue, and it was a privilege to help with building it. And with a full-time dojang to enjoy, it might be a while before I find time to write too much more in my blog !!

Sinewave and coordination

Wow – I think I’m finally beginning to understand a bit about sine wave. Sure, I’ve got the basic bit about down-up-down and I’ve understood that sinewave is part of coordinated action so that within a technique, everything ends at the same time, but I hadn’t really considered the role of sinewave in coordinating with other people or coordinating sequences of movement.

When we spar, we are always encouraged to keep moving, to keep bouncing on the balls of our feet, and all good fighters in all forms of fighting keep moving even when they aren’t actually punching or kicking. Maybe it is obvious to everyone else, but I have only just realised that the bouncing is part of sinewave, and the rhythm provides an internal beat for planning and coordinating sequences of movements. More importantly, you can speed up or slow down the beat and still execute the same sequence of movements. When you are watching your opponent, you’re not only watching them with your eyes, but you are entraining the rhythm of your bouncing to the rhythm of their movements (ie you are mirroring their timing so that you know when they will be able to execute a technique). You can then set an appropriate phase lag between your sinewave and theirs so as to time your own techniques for when your opponent is unable to respond.

So when are they unable to respond? If you know by understanding your opponent’s rhythm when they are capable of executing a technique, whether or not they do, you can adjust your sinewave (bouncing) so that your techniques will only show themselves when your opponent is already committed to whatever they were going to execute (they have already selected a ballistic movement to a specific target) or they are not yet ready to attack (they have missed that wave of their own sinewave). You will have so much more time in “planning” because you have already encoded the relative timing information between their actions and yours into your own sinewave or bouncing rhythm.

Adjusting the frequency of your bouncing (your sinewave) to encode your opponent’s movement, and adjusting your own movements to fit into that rhythm also cuts down on planning. A jumping kick is no longer different in its premotor planning to the same technique on the ground – the jump is part of the sinewave, but the wave just goes a bit higher 🙂

So – the bit that started to fall into place was that bouncing (keeping moving) in sparring is not just random moving, and not just keeping a rhythm for yourself, but it is a part of a “conversation” with your opponent to keep the appropriate timing and phase relationship between your movements and theirs, so that you always have the advantage. If you are sparring with someone who understands this conversation, the trick is to be able to change the tempo to keep the advantage.

The reason that skipping is the preferred endurance training for fighters is also an obvious correlate of sinewave. The circular motion (sine wave is a circular function in mathematical terms) of the rope powered by your arms ensures that you have to entrain your arm movements to you leg movements and you have to jump. The cyclical visual cues of the rope are also being entrained so that you can start to associate visual information with motor information. The “conversational” aspect of skipping – the entrainment to the visual cue – can be seen when someone else turns the rope. If you watch kids run in to skip in an already turning skipping rope, they move their arms or bodies up and down for a few cycles to get the rhythm of the motion. There is an easy side and a hard side to run into because on one side, there is room for error (the rope is coming down so you can duck) whereas on the other side, the rope is going up so there is no room for error.

Manuals and Curriculum

Hmmm – I’m getting to wonder whether I should be writing this in my taekwon-do blog or my work-related edublog but since the thought processes and content have come directly from interactions with my taekwon-do Instructor and fellow students, it really should go here.

Because my background is in academia, particularly in cognitive neuroscience and, for want of a better term, “educational design / pedagogy”, I have been encouraging my Instructor to provide more written materials for students to “study” at home to reinforce what they learn in class. Being an older student and academic by nature, I needed to see most things written down in order to understand them and practice them, and I found many interesting resources on the web. Fairly early on, I bought the Condensed Encyclopedia, and it was an excellent investment. Also, being a parent of a child learning taekwon-do, I wanted to be able to “help” my child practice and study correctly, on the assumption that my child would not be concentrating and therefore would miss half of what was said in class, and would practise the wrong things if he practised at all.

We have a pretty clearly set out grading manual, which explains what we need to know for each belt level, but it doesn’t have the intimate details of each pattern, nor does it have details on each technique. For that level of detail, we are encouraged to buy the Encyclopedia. When I think back to how I dealt with the lack of detailed written information that I felt I needed to help my son get the best out of taekwon-do classes, I had two approaches.

1) I attended the classes too so I could listen and learn and know what he had to practise.

2) Before I bought the encyclopedia, I put together my own set of notes from the web to support what I was learning in class, and to break down the higher level things into the level of detail I thought I needed.

What I am beginning to see more clearly now that I am assisting with classes for young children in a school environment, and my own child is older and self-directed in his learning and practice, is the bigger picture with respect to listening, learning and practice. These are things I know theoretically, but have not really carried through to the practical stage. (If you don’t want to read the longer version, the bottom line is that the kids need to want to learn themselves, not because their parents want them to. And if they want to learn, they need to know to listen and practice themselves, not have their parents do it by proxy. If they don’t want to learn, perhaps we need to look at what we model for them as parents, rather than what we actually tell them to do.)

1) The parents of some of the children want to have notes from the classes so they can help their kids practise at home. This is a good motive.

2) They want their kids to practise because they see their kids “falling behind” their classmates. This is where it becomes interesting … the kids don’t like other kids getting better than them, especially when some of the other kids are physically less naturally talented. Parents also don’t want their kid to “fall behind” even though they want them to learn “at their own pace”. Everyone wants to be the best at everything (good – although maybe I mean “do their best” rather than “be the best” …) without necessarily wanting to do the work that goes with it (bad).

3) If the kids do extra practice at home, they will perform better in class and they will “do better” and move up the line and then feel better about themselves. We probably all agree they will perform their movements better, but they will only feel better about themselves if they care about their taekwon-do movements (good) or if position in the line is important to them (bad if they don’t care about taekwon-do per se).

So although we agree that as a general rule practice is good, we probably also agree that the way to learn is to listen carefully to the Instructor in class. And we want them to learn to listen and concentrate. And we want them to do it at their own pace and not to feel pressure to keep up with anyone else, but to always try to better themselves. At least that’s what we say …

But when they are not ready to do it themselves, we want to take the short-cuts on their behalf and do it for them so they never have to feel the frustration of not knowing something when some of their peers do know it. We are very concerned that if our kids “fall behind” everyone else, that they will feel bad and not want to keep going. And undoubtedly, our kids are perfectly aware of our anxiety and disappointment on their behalf and it is actually us as parents that reinforce the idea that, if “their own pace” is a bit slower than that of their age-group peers in something, they are duds.

If we have notes on what the kids need to learn, there is another risk that I am only just understanding in this different domain although it is one of my major hobby horses in academia. When we list the things for assessment, or some specific things people “need to know”, they become focussed on learning those things, rather than seeing them as representative of the type of knowledge expected of someone at a particular level in a discipline. And we then fixate on specific things that “prove” our achievement rather than on being rounded martial artists.

And sometimes we focus on special tricks that will let us perform better on specific tasks but will not improve us in the discipline itself. And from outside of the discipline, we might see better ways of teaching the things that will be assessed to improve test performance, without understanding the bigger picture of how to learn the whole martial art. We become instant experts in how to do something despite only have the limited view of the children we know trying to learn something we don’t know ourselves.

So where am I going with this?

I have realised a few things.

1) I started taekwon-do to help my son make the most of it, and to make sure it was the sort of martial arts environment I was happy for him to be in.

2) I immersed myself in taekwon-do because after listening to my Instructor and reading the web and the Encyclopedia, I was hooked and *I* wanted to learn it myself.

When I practised (myself because I wanted to practise), quite often my son would practise too. When I left taekwon-do related material lying around on the coffee table, my son would read it and study it. Yet if I ever asked him to practise or to study something for a grading, he would point-blank refuse – kids don’t like being told to do stuff especially if thtey are told it is “good for them”. But they are naturally curious and competitive.

3) I advanced more quickly through the belts than my son because I listened to the Instructor and I practised a lot. My son would have stopped lessons mid way through (around blue belt) if I had let him – our deal was he would do it for three years if he started it at all, and I held him to that. Towards the end of the three years, he was starting to enjoy it again for himself, not for me.

His practice and study are now unrelated to what I do, except that he knows that if he tries, he can do anything that I can do better than I can do it. But I’ve done some things that he is yet to do … which bugs him, in a good way 🙂 The presence of a free standing punching bag means that he practises as often as he wants and the encyclopedia and internet means he can access as much info as he requires to understand what he is doing.

4) We can train together not because I am a parent who can make him study and make him want to do better and be proud of himself, but because I am a fellow taekwon-do student with him.

I have helped him most by being living proof that practice leads to improvement, and that you can learn to do things over time that you couldn’t do at the beginning, that it’s okay to learn more slowly than other people, that there are many different components to being a martial artist, etc etc

I have also demonstrated (not deliberately !!) the various phases one goes through in learning something, especially the inevitable frustration with the Instructor. At some point where you can almost do something, but not quite, you often feel like the Instructor is just not telling you something for their own amusement … and then when finally everything clicks into place, you realise they had told you all you needed and you just weren’t doing it properly … d’oh!!!

This frustration phase of wanting to murder your Instructor is probably the best phase for a parent to model to their kids (again, not intentionally – you can’t fake it, because it is the real depth emotion that matters !!). How often have we seen our kids frustrated about something, and sat in the seat of parenthood, pontificating about “phases” and “listen to your teacher / parent” and “just do as they / I say and stop thinking you know everything”

It can be good for a child to see their own parent being humbled by something they can’t do, being frustrated by the Instructor, seeing both sides of the story (but Mum, you’re not doing it properly …)

It is very important for them to see the reaction (and it’s important that the reaction eventually be constructive !!) If they see their parent working hard enough to master something difficult (at least to a certain degree) and then feel a sense of pride in their parent because they know how hard their parents worked to learn something … it’s a great lesson all round.

Where does that leave me?

As parents, we want to ensure that our kids have an opportunity to try everything. We want them to be good at everything. We want them to learn as much as possible and so long as they are happy, so are we.

But mastering new things involves an inevitable phase of frustration when new ideas or new movements are still taking shape.

I contend that that phase has to happen for true mastery of something difficult.

Being tired and frustrated and not wanting to continue is an important phase of learning and when the new thing is learnt, there is an exhilaration of achievement that matches the level of effort that went into that phase. So if you don’t struggle to learn something, you don’t appreciate achievement in that domain in the same way. And you don’t “own” the knowledge.

And if you never learn how to deal with the frustration because you never have to take responsibility for it and someone always steps in and gets you over it, you will not be well-equipped to cope with adult life.

So this is a critical part of the learning process, and a critical part of the mental discipline side of a martial art.

Does that mean there is no place for written teaching material in teaching taekwon-do? I don’t think so. I think that all it means is that I’ve begun to understand the real problem with written material aimed at allowing the parents to “help” their kids.

Parents can help their kids best by watching them in the classes and listening to what their kids have been told and shown. If they don’t have time for that, they can help their kids research what they need to know, or have their kids explain what they remember. The kids need to know that they are learning things that their parents *don’t* know (how cool is that for some kids?!), and parents need to remember that the act of explaining things is an act of building that knowledge into their own picture of the world.

This has been written in response to one of the teenage students wanting my help to put together some stuff for the parents so they can help the younger kids practise. I’ve realised that the major learning here is for the student putting together the material (learning by having to think about how to teach) rather than in producing materials for the parents themselves. And at some level it is not helpful to the kids to have their parents helping them – taekwon-do expertise does not derive from age, but from belt-level – ie from the amount of training and learning in taekwon-do itself.

Our Instructor is trying to instil into the kids the ability to think for themselves, to ask questions, to find answers within themselves as well as around them and to be self-motivated in what they do. It is one of those wonderful paradoxes of parenting and teaching that you can’t *teach* self-motivation. You can only encourage it, and I contend that you can only encourage it by being passionate about what you do, and inspiring others by your passion.

I have had the privilege to have been inspired by an excellent and passionate Instructor who understands the essence of teaching and is a master of what he teaches at a time when I am trying to understand in an academic framework what is special about teaching and learning and what constitutes “best practice” in that area.

The research suggests quality in teaching and learning is about the teacher-student interaction and communication rather than about disembodied content but of course “quality audits” focus on what is easily measured and disembodied content (the “curriculum”) is easy to examine “objectively”. For me, the introspection as a student and trainee-teacher in the context of an expert Instructor teaching all ages and abilities has been invaluable.

Blackbelt

I am very proud of the fact that on June 19, 2005, approximately 3 years after beginning my journey in taekwon-do, I was awarded my 1st Dan Black Belt by Sabum Spiro Cariotis. I have trained at least 3 times a week for all but the first month or so of my training, and I trained almost daily in the 6 months leading up to my grading so it was a big commitment in terms of time and energy. The blackbelt was certainly a motivating goal to keep training, but it has not been the endpoint in itself – I have continued to train 3 times a week since my grading and am still as passionate and as enthusiastic about taekwon-do as when I started. I suspect that I haven’t updated my blog until now because I needed the evidence (for myself and maybe for others) that it would indeed be the case that I would keep training with a passion. My blackbelt as an achievement in isolation is actually meaningless since in physical terms I am only just beginning to feel comfortable with moving and thinking as a “martial artist”. I am fully aware that to think in terms of expertise takes at least 10 years, so I am still in the early years of that journey. What I am convinced of is that it is possible to learn new physical pursuits at any age in life so long as you are prepared to put in the work and I still have a lot of work to do !!

I really enjoyed the grading itself – I was surprised at how smoothly the day went for me. My patterns were quite passable and although I was initially intimidated by the idea of grading alongside two girls who perform patterns with exquisite grace and skill, on the day I felt reasonably comfortable and confident and on reviewing the video afterwards, I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I also surprised myself with how comfortable I felt with fundamental movements, step sparring and self defence under the pressure of grading. Sparring was physically taxing but I was pretty confident of my fitness level and my ability to survive if not to star. The most challenging part of the grading for me was always going to be the board-breaks – I have trained for them since whitebelt level, but I am small and technique and timing are not my strong points so I have always been concerned about what might happen on the day itself. You can’t fake board breaks. As it turned out, I was very focussed and completed all the breaks asked of me. I was pretty stoked by the fact that I did a flying sidekick over 4 people (it was originally going to be over 2 people given my size and age :-)) – unfortunately my designated cameraman was so enthralled in watching us that he forgot to turn on the camera to preserve my effort for prosterity … so there is no photographic evidence of my feat !!

So I am now a black belt in taekwon-do and I’m proud of it, but it is only the first step in a longer journey to be comfortable calling myself a martial artist.

Lisa's Blackbelt grading

My blackbelt thesis
– this is a link to my blackbelt thesis on the structured curriculum of taekwon-do and why it particularly appeals to me.